E.’s reading progress

(No, that’s not a picture of E. He doesn’t have glasses.)

Just a short report here. I’m delighted with 25-month-old E.’s reading progress. We are not studying phonics nearly as carefully and systematically as we did with H. We have been going through (more or less randomly) the two ending blends presentations, adding s, and digraphs and x. More than that, we’ve been doing various quizzes. When I open up Reading Bear, E. insists on doing quizzes (about 75% of the time).

We continue to read several books per day. The level of the books is now decidedly beyond the baby books, and now we’re into the toddler books. To take a few examples, we’ve been reading quite a bit of Curious George, as well as the little-kid versions of fairy tales from Mary Engelbreit. He still likes the Biscuit stories, which are incredibly annoying.

We’re also doing stuff on the iPad, including Reading Bear on iSwifter, the Starfall app (which is great), some vocabulary apps, some counting apps, etc.

When looking at screens, he’s been spending at least as much time on Starfall and Literactive as on Reading Bear. I still haven’t found any other free sites with decodable stories that can be sounded out with a click, like Starfall and Literactive. Have you? Please tell me about them in the comments. Anyway, I’ve been delighted at how well he’s been reading beyond the level that he is at on Reading Bear. Like H., his ability to decode words in the context of a story is a few steps beyond his nominal phonics level. My hypothesis is that he has been figuring out unfamiliar phonics principles on his own. There is no reason to be too surprised at this, it seems to me; once you know the letter sounds and have some modest experience viewing how letters and sounds match up, there are usually a few obvious ways to decode an unfamiliar sequence of letters, and it’s just a matter of mentally trying them out and picking the one that matches a word you’ve heard. I wonder if research supports this hypothesis.

Another thing we look at quite a bit on my desktop are my presentations. He is crazy about my “Balloons” presentation (still) and likes many others, like “Kids,” “The Mind,” “Chemistry 1” (not as hard as it sounds), etc. These are all available on Slideboom. I made a new one, too, called “Bubbles,” which he likes. (Unfortunately, funding for new presentations is not forthcoming at this time.)

I think E. is a few months ahead of where H. was at this age (not surprising, considering that I started teaching E. phonics earlier), but at this age H. was a little ahead of where E. is in terms of books he prefers. This also shouldn’t be surprising considering that I was able to spend more time with H. on his reading.

But all in all I’ve used similar methods with my two boys and in terms of their educational outcomes, they’re very similar so far. I’d definitely say that E. is reading now, at age two, in the sense that he is able to decode most, probably all, of the words in certain stories that he can understand and enjoy.

I’ve made a video of E. reading, but it shows his face and all and Mama can’t have that online. I’ll make another one soon.